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Friday, September 11, 2009

Nine Eleven

May we never forget those who lost their lives that tragic day 
and for those who fight for our freedoms every day.

Do you remember the exact moment you heard or saw the news?

I remember it like it was yesterday.  Mr. YnB called me to tell me something major was going on in NYC.  He was driving and could not get details, so I first went to my homepage to check the top news stories, and all I saw was "Small Plane Hits WTC".  I then turned on the TV and saw Manhattan totally engulfed in black smoke. 

17 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't remember the exact moment I knew to turn the tv on but I remember being late to leave for work b/c I was glued to the set.

NobblySan said...

I was at work, when I saw a brief article on the BBC news site "Plane hits WTC tower" (or similar). I forwarded it to a friend in the office, headed "Bloody hell!", and he replied "Drunk in charge?"

Little could we imagine the scale of what was about to unfold.

As the situation developed, the whole building ground to a halt as we refreshed our screens for news updates. All attempts to phone or email friends and colleagues in the USA failed, and the internet ceased to be of use as the entire network was jammed solid.

Our Managing director, who had just finished the awful task of laying off a dozen or so staff, came and stood behind my desk, staring over my shoulder at my monitor.

"Bloody hell", said Pete, "I thought I'd had to hand out some bad news today, but this puts it into perspective."

We all stood around in relative silence, and drove home in the same mood, glancing upwards whenever an aeroplane from the nearby Manchester Airport flew overhead.

dave hambidge said...

Wife and I were just leaving her parents home, where we now live, after lunch when her Dad switched on the TV to show us a brief video clip. Instead we dropped in onto BBC News 24 just as the second aircraft impacted the towers.

Will never forget the horror.

Some 2 years later, then a widower, we took my FIL on a cruise to help him over his grief. As we crossed the Bay of Biscay a French Navy patrol aircraft (Orion?) flew very close to our cruise ship. FIL was sure it was going to crash into us! He, Len, passed away 4 months ago.

yorksnbeans said...

Sorry to hear that Dave. I think I would have had a heart attack if I saw a plane flying close to a my cruise ship I was on (or any building I happened to be in for that matter).

Nobs...I was in a funk for about a week. I was glued to the TV, but I couldn't pull myself away.

linlah said...

At my kitchen sink watching TV thinking it was a movie trailer. Horrified when I realized it wasn't.

Anonymous said...

I was driving out to a remote community in the middle of nowhere. I turned the radio off and thought I would just enjoy a few hours of quiet.

When I finally arrived at this small gov't office (more of a small shack) everyone there was gathered around the t.v. watching the news. It felt a little surreal. My meeting was cancelled and I rushed home but it was hours later before I really started to understand what was going on.

Joanna Jenkins said...

I remember the exact moment we got the call to turn the tv on-- in time to see the 2nd plane crash into the towers. Then I remember frantically trying to find our family vacationing in NYC. Oy. Thank god they were safe. xo

Matty said...

I had just left a breakfast date with my girlfriend ( now my wife ), and was driving back home when I heard it all on the radio. I started calling everybody I knew to see if they heard, and what they knew that I didn't.

nonnie9999 said...

my son woke me up and told me to turn on the tv. he was on the phone with his ex-girlfriend, who was watching it happen from her apartment window.

Anonymous said...

I had a cold and was lying on the couch watching Fox News when they cut to a female reporter on top of a building reporting that a small plane had crashed into the tower. As she was still talking the second plane came in.I didn't move from my couch for 48 hours watching it all unfold (and channel surfing of course).
The free to air stations had been playing the movie Siege and many people who had fallen asleep said they thought they were still watching the movie when they woke up. All stations were on live feeds for at least 24 hours.
A friend of mine was due to be on Flight 11 but when he arrived at the airport he had a bad, bad feeling and decided to catch the next flight. He still has the fateful flight 11 ticket.Interestingly he said he had never ever canceled a flight before in his life.

yorksnbeans said...

Loon....that just gave me goose bumps! Your friend obviously has some psychic powers.

Duncanr said...

Quite similar to Nobbly - was at work when news began to filter through that something 'major' had happened. No work done the rest of the day as we all tried to follow events on our PCs, jumping from one news site to another, trying to find one that hadn't 'crashed' because of sheer volume of people trying to access it.

As it happened, Anita (Mrs D) was in Chicago at a Trade Exhibition with our MD when it happened. All activity at the Exhibition stopped as they watched events unfolding on the large screens located around the place. Needless to say, the Exhibition was cancelled and there was then a frantic scramble to get home. Not an easy task - because all flights in and out of USA were stopped in the immediate aftermath, thereby creating a backlog of travellers when restrictions were eventually lifted. She was 'trapped' in Chicago for 3 days before she could get on a plane back to the UK

Anonymous said...

Gee, you know what gave me the shivers Yorks & Beans? Just looking at the date and especially the times of these comment posts. The first by Bearman 9.37 (22 minutes before the first tower fell), 10.25 ( 3 minutes before the second tower fell). This was the day and these were the times that every life around the world changed.

yorksnbeans said...

I agree...just seeing the date written out gives me shivers. I never noticed the closeness of the comment times, though....eerie!

Anonymous said...

I live (and work from my home) about three miles from the Pentagon, and I was dating my notorious Albino Ex at the time, who works for the Department of Justice downtown and is a former EMT who gets sniffly hearing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the best of times.

He called me round about quarter to ten when, having worked the previous evening till nine, I was just getting going on some laundry, and asked if I had the radio on. I never do. "Someone just flew a plane into the Pentagon," he said, and when I had the common reaction that it was some drunk in a Beechcraft Bonanza, explained the rest.

My house is across from a big Army/State Department installation, and they emptied that sucker out lickety-split. I waited till I was sure they weren't fixing to evacuate the whole hood, put on my boogie shoes and headed in to see how far I could get. I encountered these things:

- Police cruisers enforcing detours at every ramp to the nearest Interstate
- Fire trucks pouring deafeningly in from departments as far away as Pennsylvania
- An office building emptied by a copy-cat bomb-threater, and a friend from the local co-op trying to hatch a scheme to sell them sandwiches -- fact.
- Radio squawk from the emergency workers at the Pentagon, when I detoured by my Albino Ex's place, since he keeps the scanner on all the time and I had a key. "I gotta get more bags of saline down here!"
- Reporters being told that if they took one goddam photo of the crash site or any of the line of shell-shocked Pentagon workers straggling up Columbia Pike, they'd have all their stuff confiscated
- And last and deepest imprinted in my memory, a skinny, old, bearded African-American bindle stiff from the nearby men's detox shelter, clad in a reflective vest and deputized to wave motorists onto the detour from the westbound Pike at the police line. He was grinning from ear to ear, pirouetting as he waved his baton with the economical grace of a dancer hearing phantom music, the happiest man I saw the entire day.

The column of steam rising from beyond the Pentagon overpasses was big as a building, blinding white like cumulus towers viewed from an airplane window.

Washington has maybe five beautiful weather days a year. That one was perfect.

yorksnbeans said...

Welcome SD!! I had to look up "bindlestiff". I have never heard that term before. Was he really deputized or was it just in his imagination? How funny! That beautiful blue sky is one thing that will always stand out in my mind. Such a beautiful backdrop to one of the worst days in our history.

Anonymous said...

I have to think it was for real, because he didn't get that vest from nowhere. The Arlington PD was running short of manpower that day.